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Launch day Belgian CanSat competition

Posted: Jun 19, 2015

On May 22, 2015, the launch day of this year's Belgian CanSat competition took place. 7 high-school teams worked hard to obtain first place in this motivating educational project.
T-Minus provided the launch at the finals of the competition, ejecting the CanSats at an altitude of 1.2 km with our dedicated CanSat launcher. A beautiful sunny day at ASK 't Harde, with two exciting rocket launches.

The teams worked hard for almost a year to complete their experiment. As always, some very interesting missions were proposed, such as measuring air pollution and applying a spectrometer.

The teams arrived from Belgium on Wednesday and were allowed some last minute tinkering at Delft University of Technology, before they were inspected for flight acceptance. On Friday, early in the morning, the teams arrived at ASK 't Harde where the ground stations were set up. T-Minus' new mobile launch tower was already set up the day before, which proved to be as easy as it was designed to be.

The first launch window opened at 10:30, and at 11:00, the rocket was ready for lift-off. The wind was calm, and the rocket could be tracked all the way to apogee on its beautifully stable flight, thanks to the clear sky. At apogee, the CanSats were successfully deployed and the parachute ejected. The parachute got entangled, which lead to a somewhat high descent velocity. Fortunately, the launch vehicle did not suffer any major damage.
The second launch resulted in a textbook flight. Again, the flight path was very stable and the CanSats and parachute deployed successfully at apogee. After recovery of this second rocket, the launch tower was transported to the ground station area, and the used CanSat launcher was installed to allow for some photo shoots.

On Saturday, the final presentations and prize ceremony took place at Space Expo Noordwijk. T-Minus Engineering congratulates the winners: team Atmos.